Category: Practical Theology

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The Coin We Pay

The Coin We Pay  |  Matthew 22:15-22  |  Lectionary Project

PennyWideTaxes are as certain as death, we say. Those are the only two things we tend to say it about, death and taxes. Saying it may be more of a confession than we know. It may be that those are the things we believe are true.

Conniving tricksters came and asked Jesus whether it was right to pay taxes. They weren’t seeking clarity and insight, and they certainly didn’t have the courage to rebel and refuse to pay their taxes. They just wanted to throw Jesus under the express bus to Rome.

“Give to caesar the things that are caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” Jesus told them.

Separate what is God’s and what is of the world. That is the plainest meaning of what Jesus told the fellows trying to get him on the wrong side of the emperor. It is worth a second reading, though. Jesus saw through the deception, but he may have laid a trap of his own. What if there was another meaning to his answer?

Jesus asked what likeness was on a coin. The tricksters thought Jesus meant the one in his hand.HourGlassCoins6x4

What if the point was to get us to recognize the coin we use? The old challenge is to put your money where your mouth is. Maybe this challenge is to recognize the price we pay. The trick is to see that the coin we use is stamped with our own likeness.

Everything comes with a price. Each day, each choice. Every yes contains a no, as the saying goes. For every choice, we pay the price in time, in thought, in energy, and in the effect on who we are and who we might become. That is the price we pay.

The coin we use is life. And we pay it either for something ephemeral or for something that lasts. When we look in the mirror and see someone wrinkled and spotty looking back at us, what do we have for the price we paid? What did our coins get us? Where did we invest our assets?

The face on the coin is our own. The currency is measured in time, our time, our lives, and there is a hole in our sock. There is less in the bank every day, whether we buy anything with it or not.

Let the world collect its gold. It never was ours. If you don’t believe me, try dying and see what happens to the dollars you’ve got piled up. Our wealth melts away even faster when we move on than when we were alive, and after a couple of exchanges nobody remembers what hand held it.

Our lives are not like that. Even if we believe that after death there is nothing, there was still this life. We may feel that our lives are inconsequential, of no account, but we have a real effect, good or bad, on the people around us. Their lives are different because of ours, and ours changed because of them. We can’t see our own legacy. Perhaps that is God’s work.

And if we believe that life continues after death, then we carry that sum of choices with us, the transactions of our souls. Each moment continues to be an opportunity, a new investment.

The coin we pay is life. Shop well.

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The Whims of God

The Whims of God  |  Matthew 22:1-14

Castle Disney 4x6No one wanted to come to the party, at least no one who had been invited. We don’t know why. The story doesn’t tell us. Maybe it had something to do with the guests themselves—perhaps they were not party minded people. Maybe it had something to do with the king—perhaps they didn’t like this king, and this was their rebellion.

We do hear that some of them went so far as to kill the messengers who came to invite them. We also hear that the king did not react well to the news. With a feast planned and a wedding party ready to start, the king killed the folk he had invited and burned down their city. That was bad enough, but the story gets worse. We hear that after the death and the destruction, this king sent his guards to force new people to come to his party. There must have been a killer dress code: one of the guests, having first been dragged to the feast, was then blamed for not wearing the right clothes. It was a fatal fashion faux pas.

The story makes us uneasy. This king seems unstable, capricious, and vengeful. If the king in this story is God, that just makes the tale more alarming. A city is burned down and people are killed because they don’t come to a party? A man is punished because he wasn’t dressed appropriately when he was kidnapped?

And Christians wonder why church attendance is down.

A story with a meaning is one thing. Making a story into an allegory, that is something else again. Making a parable into an allegory can have unintended consequence—making God as whimsical and vengeful as the king in this story, for example.

The idea of a vengeful God, judging and condemning people in reactionary, arbitrary ways, can worry even the faithful. There are thoughtful people who turn their backs on religion because they hear too much about rules of behavior and the judgment of God and too little about the reason for the feast. Presumably, the people shouting about rules and judgment believe that they have reserved seats at the table, and they are confident about their wardrobe. Meanwhile, they become the reason that other folks beg out of attending the party.

Another version of Matthew’s story is told in Luke 14:16-24. As Luke tells it, the people who don’t come offer pretty valid excuses, and nobody is killed. Presumably the story is based on the same source, the sayings of Jesus. The fact that the same story could be recounted so differently is interesting on many levels. For one thing, to tell the same story in such different ways, Luke and Matthew must have intended to make different points.

Matthew reminds his audience, and in the story Jesus is reminding the leaders of the temple, of a long history of rejected prophets. (If they went around telling stories like this one, it should have been no surprise that people didn’t listen.) Rather than trying to paint a picture of an angry God, one who condemns and kills, it may be that Matthew was making a heavy handed attempt to say something about grace.

Yes, grace, somewhere there in the midst of the burning and the killing. I said it was heavy handed, didn’t I?

The king sends out invitations to everybody and anybody, starting with the expected and ending with the inexplicable. The point may be that though the invitation is freely given, or even when it is forced upon us, the response still matters. Showing up means something. And freshening up our outfit may have more to do with our heart than with our shoes.Smile by Force

When I was growing up, I was taught that there were times and places where one was expected to ‘appear interested,’ as in, “You need to sit up and appear interested.” That meant that slouching and looking like I was bored was not going to be acceptable. Even if I was not interested, manners dictated that I try to engage.

Matthew is telling us that God is bringing everyone to the party, one way or another. Ignoring the invitation does not appear to be a good idea, not in Matthew’s Gospel. And what is on the outside in the story represents what is on the inside in our lives. God has already brought us to the party. This is it, all around us, from the moment we are born, shoved into it kicking and screaming. What matters is the response of our hearts. It’s time we sit up and appear interested.

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The Crush of Words

The Crush of Words  |  Matthew 21:33-46

They were not good for much, these old men, not any more, but you could not get them to believe it. They graced the temple with their leadership, in their minds, and they had the robes to prove it.

GrapesWhiteWideHere sat this nobody of a man, a carpenter who hailed from Nazareth by way of Capernaum. He had the gall to sit in the temple and teach. Worst of all, he was popular. The crowds ate it up, as though anyone needed another reason to despise the fellow.

Those old men might have let him get away with it, might have let him have his moment of glory and move on. There was always somebody the nitwitted public was ready to follow, somebody with a strong voice and smooth promises that these fools were ready to hear. It never lasted long, and when the latest song fell so far off the charts that the crowd couldn’t even remember how to hum it, the priests would still be there. Yes, they might have just waited him out, let him have his few minutes of fame, but he went and started telling stories.

It’s bad enough to be made the butt of a joke, but it’s even worse to be made the point of a story. People might laugh at the joke for a while, but eventually they would suspect it was a little mean hearted, maybe even an untrue exaggeration. A story, though? Long after people forget how to tell a joke, they still remember a story.

Jesus told the story of a man who left his winery under the care and management of a crack team of businessmen. They stole his profits, killed his auditors, and even murdered the heir to his fortune in a botched attempt at a violent corporate takeover. We don’t knowGrapevines whether this winery was in Sicily, but we’re familiar with the kind of criminals this bunch of businessmen turned out to be. While the story pointed out the self-serving nature of the temple leaders, the tale also points to a truth about our world. We are not all honest; some say none of us are. Some of us are even willing to use violence to satisfy our greed, and some of us disguise our violence as the unintended side effect of a free market.

Jesus used words to dismantle the establishment. Jesus used stories to question authority, to stick it to the man.

That’s one thing we can take from this passage—the power of words. Jesus was in a position to stand up and lead a revolution that even the Romans would have respected. Instead, he sat down and told stories to the crowd. The revolution he started was in their minds, and ideas can’t be stopped, not by Roman soldiers or riot police.

Isaiah offers a fresh version of the promise the Lord makes with the faithful, people whose minds are engaged in the story of God:

…my spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouths of your children, or out of the mouths of your children’s children, says the Lord, from now on and forever.  —Isaiah 59:21, NRSV

Words. They separate us from the other animals. Words form our human inheritance, inform our civilization, serve to bring the presence of God into our lives. Words are powerful, as useful as cornerstones and as dangerous as a falling rock.

 

Photos by Granny™

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Odd Prophets

Odd Prophets  |  Matthew 21:23-32

GrapevineVertReligious folk came and asked Jesus what he was up to. They may have wanted a straight answer, but they didn’t get it.

Who said you had anything to teach us? That’s what they were asking. Who made you the spokesperson for God? They dressed the question up, of course, to make it sound reasonable, but the condescension and the resentment were still there.

Jesus responded with a question of his own, a riddle—who sent John the Baptist, that wild loon of a prophet baptizing all kinds of people out in the wilderness? They wouldn’t answer him. They were afraid to answer because they didn’t want to give Jesus any leverage, as if he needed any more.

So he did the Jesus thing. He told them a story. Why? Why tell a story when calling down fire and brimstone would have been so much more fun?

There’s power in words that cannot be found in a fist, or in a bomb. You can only clinch a fist so long, and after a while even brimstone burns out, but words?

A good story is unforgettable. It keeps playing in the back of your mind. Worse, a good story is a Trojan horse for the truth. By the time you realize there’s meaning in the story you’re hearing, it’s already running amuck in your mind. There is no getting it out.Grapevines3

The story Jesus puts in their minds is simple. A father tells one son to go and work in their vineyard, but he refuses. Later, the boy gets up and goes to work anyway. Then the father finds his other son and tells him to get to work, and this boy agrees at once, but he never lifts a finger.

Which liar was the faithful son?

Open rebellion is more honest and faithful than secret disobedience, and Jesus claims that prostitutes and scoundrels are closer to God than religious folk are. That’s pretty good news for prostitutes and scoundrels. It’s not much of a recommendation for the rest of us.

Worse, the story doles out a double damning for the self-proclaimed good folk—our faith is worthless if it doesn’t respond to what God is doing in our own lives, and more than worthless if it doesn’t respond to what God is doing in the lives around us. If Jesus had pointed at John, a wild haired man ranting in the wilderness, and asked us who sent him, we wouldn’t have answered him either. The prostitutes, scoundrels, drug addicts, and thieves would at least have ventured a guess.

Most of us, I suspect, are too afraid to be true scoundrels. And nobody is suggesting prostitution as a viable lifestyle choice. Still, if we believe these stories in the gospels, scoundrels and the prostitutes went far out of their way to hear wild John preaching down by the river.

We good folk worry more about who has the right credentials than about who might be channeling a word from God. I’ve got degrees hanging on the wall, and education is not to be despised, but someone off the street, uneducated and untrained, may just have something God wants us to hear. God seems to use the oddest prophets. Only a few of them wear ties.

And we say that we’re responding to God, but we move our lips more than we reach out our hands. Meanwhile, God smiles on the folks who say they want nothing to do with church or religion but who still respond to the weird prophets God sends.

Which bunch of liars has more faith?

If the stories in scripture are our guide, God does use some odd folk. All by itself, that thought is encouraging to many of us. Moses the stammering murderer. Isaiah who walked around naked in public for three years. I wonder how much credence we religious folk would give a murderer and an exhibitionist. Jail time and medication are more likely what we’d offer them.

Grapevines4

The truth is that we are all liars of different sorts. Some of us say we listen to God, when we are really listening to our own ideas about God. Ever find yourself sitting across from a friend but focusing on what you’re thinking instead of what your friend is saying? Same thing.

We may not want anything to do with God or anybody else’s ideas about God. Still, there’s that small voice running amuck in our heads, muttering that something might be out there and that it wouldn’t hurt to listen for a while.

One thing is for sure. If God is really God, then God is not going to go about things the way we would think. God is not like us. And God has some odd prophets. Some of them have done terrible things, like Moses. Some might come walking down the street naked, like Isaiah. Some might look uncomfortably like people we don’t even like or want to be around.

My dog was named after a prophet—Malachi—and I’m sure that he can tell me more about God than I know, but do I listen?

Stop walking around with the answers. Start listening to the questions. Who knows? Now and then we may run into some odd prophets. Let’s just hope they’re dressed better than Isaiah.

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No Fair

No Fair  |  Matthew 20:1-16

Pouting2God isn’t fair. Even a blind man can see that. (If we believe the Gospels, a few of them did.)

Take this parable of a man hiring workers and paying them all the same, the ones who worked all day and the ones who only worked a little while. They all received what they were promised, but the ones who worked the longest complained that it was not fair.

We would agree with them. In fact, most countries have laws in place to protect against such treatment. It was not fair.

Was it wrong? That’s a different question.

The landowner, in whom we may easily see God, honors the promise of a daily wage. The promise is kept, but the wages are not fair, not in the eyes of the people who worked all day only to receive the same wage as those who only worked a little while. Never mind that everyone received everything they were promised. A coin may look like more in some hands than in others.

Those people who were given work and a living wage at the beginning of their day know nothing of the anxiety and despair of those who sit and wait, worrying about how to feed their families, how to buy clothes for them, or medicine. It may be that those who are hired late in the day have already worked harder than those who did not have to worry. When we have what we need, it is easy to think it is because we are somehow better, more deserving, than those who have nothing. We forget the poor. You know, the ones we always have with us.

God is God, and we are not. Many would say so and be right. So God gives more than what was promised—what is wrong with that? Is it not an expression of grace? God has promised us nothing that we have not received or at least might still receive, for good or bad.

There is another side to the coin. Think of the old stories of the descendants of Abraham, the exodus from Egypt, and the entrance into their new homeland. How about the Egyptian soldiers swept away by the sea—were they all evil? What about the people who were displaced and killed when the Israelites entered their new land—did they all deserve such treatment? And there are other stories. How about the boys who teased Elisha—was that enough to set the bears on them, if that is what God did?

God is not fair, it seems. Sometimes God paints with a brush that is far wider than we would like, or with one far too narrow. That person is helped, but we are not. We are blessed, and our neighbors appear to be forgotten, overlooked by God. Some of us are born free and live well in rich lands. Others are born into poverty and eke out a living in the poorest places on earth. None of us has any say in where we are born, for good or bad.

And neither we nor they, the blessed nor the overlooked, can say anything. If God were fair, if we each received what we deserved, the earth would have been rid of all of us long ago. At the same time, we might say to Isaiah that we are not clay pots that have no voice in how we are shaped. The potter may make or break the pot, but we may do something that the clay cannot—we may choose how to respond.

And what choice makes sense in the face of the unfairness of God? There is only the response of Job, who lost everything except the things he wished were gone—trust, and faith that God is worthy of it.

Meanwhile, we might remember the people who are still waiting for a day’s wage or a place at the table.

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